An Internet search engine is typically designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Users submit search queries to the search engine and the search engine identifies and presents a list of documents in response to each search query. The list of documents may include web pages, images, sounds, and other types of files, typically identified and retrievable by their uniform resource locators (URLs). The list of documents is typically ranked according to various relevance and quality parameters before being presented to the user.
The ranked documents may be associated with related search terms. The search terms may be presented to the user of a search engine by automatically populating the search term data field with relevant search terms or combinations of search terms (e.g., “auto-completion”). The user may then read through the various search term results and may or may not select one of the terms or group of terms that would be used to perform the search. In this example, the user has to read each search term individually and may not even find a relevant search term result. As a result, attempts to use an auto-completion or auto-suggest feature often slows a user's progress with performing a query.